To everybody who is interested about electronic portfolios here you have the information about a book written by the Digifolio members.

Digifolio is a Comenius project. The main objective of the digiFolio Project is to use the educational possibilities of portfolios supported by ICT in teacher's professional development leading to the building up of new competences and new approaches in the learning methodologies.

The digiFolio publication can be downloaded here (PDF format 987K)

I hope the publication will be useful.

Sincerely

Fernando

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Fernando Albuquerque Costa
Faculdade de Psicologia e de Ciências da Educação
UNIVERSIDADE DE LISBOA
Aprender Com Tecnologias: www.aprendercom.net 
Blogue pessoal: www.aprendercom.info/miragem

Incremental steps toward integrating technology in teaching can pay big dividends....

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I've been lurking for a while, however this is my first post here, so hello :D.

When I first started looking at elgg it was because I was watching developments with moodle and hoping to integrate these for students at the school where I work. However, I then decided to train as a teacher and to that end am now using elgg for my own graduate trainee programme portfolio. FYI this (vocational) portfolio consists of:

• lesson plans
• evidence sheets (signed off by other people)
• witness statements (written by other people)
• logs of mentor meetings
• refective logs of professional development opportunities
• weekly reflective logs
• lesson observations

However, there is some resistence from the DRB who are responsible for training and recommending me for QTS, towards me using this environment. They are concerned that it is not "transparent" enough, in particular:

1. that people I work with who might need to "sign off" on a piece of evidence, won't want to go through the process of creating usernames etc
2. the assessor will want to work with paper, not from a screen (plus issue 1).
1. and if they don't mind working from a screen, won't want to have to log into anything.
   

Part of this perception is probably my fault; I have chosen to do most of the record keeping behind virtual "closed doors". There is so much reflection required that I think it is more liberating for me to be able to do this in front of a small invited group rather than the whole world :(.

Following a discussion yesterday, I committed to printing out everything at the end of the year for assessment, if the assessor and external tutor require it.

If they don't, I thought that it would be fairly trivial to add the public, via my access controls, to the group I have setup via network controls so that at the very end of this process, and in time for assessment, I could just open up all the work (which is currently restricted to that group) to the public and the assessor could browse to their hearts content.

Unfortunately, it appears not to be so simple, and I wonder if anyone has any idea what I could do? Or if, to make a wider point, this is something that should perhaps be considered as a necessary requirement of an eportfolio system?

Looking at the way that access controls are presented, it would appear to me as though it would not be out of the realms of possibility to make access "circular" i.e. where now we can choose to open a document to public, make it private or add a group, we could also do the same to a group. So for example, I have a started a public group call GTP Community, if I could make that group truly public (anyone can read) and then add that group to my access controls for my group. Or more simply, that we could have the choice to open a closed network group to the public and with the option to close it down again.

The problem would be, I guess,if elgg access has been designed heirarchically, however, if it is more "flat" (apologies if these are the wrong terms), then surely this kind of opening and closing of access would be possible.

Hope that makes sense, I'm thinking it needs a diagram. I hope you'll be able to advise me.

Cheers

Mandy 

One of the concerns I have is how sustainable will Elgg be. If the e-portfolio becomes an indispensible, lifelong exercise, how do we ensure that it is still available after their 3 or 4 years at university? It is not feasible to host it on the university server (for 50 years??), so will it still be available from Elgg.net, or is there a permanent solution?  

Thanks in advance. 

Does anyone think this will close the gap in the market for comercial VLE's? It seems to cut across many features of Elgg. We are hoping to do side by side comparisons of Elgg, WebCT and our MIS system to see where we can get the best info into and out from our systems.

How many different needs we have here. Does any one else have ideas of a matrix to map the flow of demands from different groups?

We have Government, HE sector, Professional Acrediting bodies, PDP, IPE and a raft of smaller groups. All with seemingly different agendas Much like George Roberts wrote back in December. I would welcome some feedback and to share ideas on the UK, European, and World wide views. Any pointers are greatfully received.